Press Releases

Montgomery County Council committee highlights for Thursday, March 16

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Montgomery Council committee to discuss

performance of County’s MC311

centralized call center

on Thursday, March 16

ROCKVILLE, Md., March 15, 2017—The Montgomery County Council’s Government Operations and Fiscal Policy (GO) Committee at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 16, will hold a worksession to review the performance of the County’s MC311 centralized call system. The review will include discussion of a report from the County’s Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) regarding the call center’s performance.

The GO Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember Nancy Navarro and includes Councilmembers Sidney Katz and Hans Riemer, will meet in the Seventh Floor Conference Room of the Council Office Building at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville. The meeting will be will be televised live by County Cable Montgomery (CCM), which can be viewed on Cable Channels 996 (high definition) and 6 (standard definition) on Comcast; Channels 1056 (HD) and 6 (SD) on RCN; and Channel 30 on Verizon. The sessions also will be available live via streaming through the Council web site at http://tinyurl.com/z9982v8 .

In compiling its report, OLO spoke to five other major jurisdictions that employ a 311 call system. Those jurisdictions were Boston, Dallas, Miami-Dade (Florida), Philadelphia and San Francisco.

The OLO report states that MC311, which is overseen by the County’s Executive Branch, receives 40,000 phone calls per month and a total of 50,000 requests for services and information. This compares to Boston handling approximately 26,000 calls per month and Miami-Dade handling 140,000 calls per month.

MC311’s speed of answer target of 20 seconds,” states the OLO report, “is faster than targets in the other jurisdictions, which ranged from 30 seconds (Boston) to 150 seconds (Miami-Dade).” In 2015, 83 percent of MC311 requests were resolved by representatives during the initial call to MC311.

The report concludes, “In sum, OLO finds that the Executive’s approach to MC311 performance measurement is consistent with best practices. However, opportunities exist to track additional information and improve the quality of performance data.”